Ferndale to expand parking enforcement hours in early June

Parking enforcement hours in Ferndale will be expanded early next month and officials expect to decide by the end of the year how much to increase parking rates.

Officials have spent much of the past several months smoothing our wrinkles with a new pay-station system that replaced 900 parking meters in public parking lots. Users complained about a lack of light at the new stations early on.

Mayor Dave Coulter said parking enforcement hours, currently 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., will be expanded to 9 p.m. staring June 3. The City Council approved the expanded hours at its meeting Monday.

"Ultimately we are going to expand enforcement hours to 10 p.m. at night," he said, "but not until we have adequate lighting at all the pay stations and the system is bug free."

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The city has installed keyboard lighting on all of Ferndale's parking pay stations and two lighting prototypes have been placed in different locations to determine how effective they are.

On the bright side, Coulter said the new system allows city officials to track information on parking patterns and peak hours at individual lots in real time.

"Data from the machines tells us where the heaviest use is and what the heaviest hours are for parking," Coulter said.

The two parking lots on Withington and Troy streets in the downtown are the most active. The level of activity at individual lots will help officials decide future enforcement hours, and different parking rates at different lots.

"All parking lots are not created equal," Coulter said. "We have looked at making lots with the most usage into premium lots, and other lots cheaper to encourage people to use them."

The city is analyzing parking data to determine where a public parking deck might be most needed. The downtown has a shortage of several hundred parking spaces during peak evening and weekend hours.

The city needs to increase its parking rates to generate enough money to pay for a downtown parking deck, City Manager April Lynch said.

"We're going to be focusing this summer on transactions in the different lots and determine where the highest needs are," she said. "By September we should have a clearer plan of action on how to get where we want."

Future parking rate increases will be based chiefly on how much money the city needs to gross from parking fees and tickets to fund a parking deck.

A parking deck with about 400 spaces would cost roughly $8 million, Lynch said. For a deck that size, the city would need to bring in more than $800,000 a year to pay off a bond and maintain the structure.

Currently, the city generates more than $700,000 a year in parking fees and fines.